The Basics of Testing with Perl

So you've got your latest applica­tion runn­ing smooth­ly, more or less, and you get it out in the wild. Your clients like the fea­tures for the most part, but there's this one thing they'd like to see chan­ged. It's not a major tweak, but it re­quires some minor chan­ges to the in­tern­als. So, you go ahead and make your chan­ges and push it out to the client. The client *loves* the new fea­ture ex­cept... the rest of your applica­tion is com­plete­ly and ut­ter­ly brok­en! If this scenario sounds familiar, a com­prehen­sive auto­mated test­ing pro­cedure is what your app needs. If you dread test­ing, this talk is for you. This talk should pro­vide a brief over­view of why you should test, what to test and what *not* to test, some basic CPAN test­ing modules, how to set up a test suite, and the con­cept of Test Driv­en De­velop­ment.